Month: April 2012

Spend two hours in the UK. The year is 1984 and your friends are wear black.

“this film has been rescued from an old mildewed-and-damaged VHS cassette tape so the quality in the first few minutes is pretty poor, but it settles down fine just in time for the action inside the club itself. The original video was commissioned by the couple who ran the club (Annie and Pete Swallow) and was distributed amongst family, friends and people who frequented it. I can’t remember if there was a charge for it at the time [thanks to the commenter who told us it was £2], probably was. This is the complete full length video as originally presented.” – Patrick Torsney

One of the best records in my collection is the Nettwerk Sound Sampler Volume Two. For a long time I was one of the few people I knew who owned the music on it. Today you can find all the tracks on YouTube. While I’m no longer so special it’s good you can all hear the Dog House Mix of Skinny Puppy’s Addiction. Great strings and a wild vocal performance get paired with a clear Roland TR-808 taking what could never be a dance track exactly to the dancefloor. This is one of my favorite pieces of music for many reasons. Desperate, deranged, talking in my sleep again.

“best ever (and.. 808 ridden!) rendition of the track by Skinny Puppy released in 1988 on the second Nettwerk sampler “A Food for Thought”” – states1024

The wonderfully titled abcdefg has been one of those iOS music apps I show friends to blow them away. Konsonant (iTunes link) is Joerg Piringer’s follow up. Don’t be afraid to use your konsonant creations in your own music productions.

“konsonant is an extraordinary exploration of letters, voice and technology by the media artist joerg piringer. Following the award winning success of piringer’s app abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz konsonant is the next iteration of the artist’s ongoing research on the potential entertaining qualities of letters and sound.” – joerg.piringer.net

Izotope has released a “sampling re-synthesizer” called Iris. Many years ago I was at Sam Ash in White Plains. There was a guy demoing some IRCAM software. He told me it was top secret. You could see audio; not in a waveform sense but spread like an image with varying colors as parts of the sounds. You could then draw on the image and filter out audio. That product was never released to the public. I suspect the French government was using it in it’s crime labs. Iris reminds me of that software and a bit more. Some of the tech from Iris certainly comes from Izotope’s own amazing RX audio cleaning software. Check out the videos above as they will show you what Iris can do better than any text. I’m going to get this one and first thing put my own vocals into it. It’s $149 USD and comes with a 4GB library.

“Evolve your sounds rapidly with Iris?s diverse and intuitive visual selection tools. By drawing shapes in the Iris spectrogram, you can isolate speciic audio frequencies within a sample and play them back immediately on your MIDI keyboard.” – izotope.com

Here’s an interesting concept I found over on the Synthtopia blog. You know time lapse photography? Well what about time lapse audio recordings? phonoLapse is Mac or PC software that let’s create such recordings. What do you think?

“phonoLapse is a free desktop app for Mac and Windows that lets you create audio time-lapses. For the 2010 Enterferenze New Art Festival I put together a little Time Lapse Phonography piece that followed me over the course of 24 hours. I have been receiving emails from people wanting to create their own, and decided to work on a standalone version so you too can create some time-lapse phonography” – soundplusdesign.com

There is a new Llamasoft aka Jeff Minter game out! Five a Day, like all the other Minter games I mention on this blog is a psychedelic arcade gameplay winner. Jeff is on a massive success streak with iOS (and iCade). Just get the game. It’s a perfect way to rest your ears in between long studio sessions. If you want a long extended review of the game check out this one over at Kill Screen: click here. Jeff if you ever read this you can use any of my music in your games!

“Minter has developed a style of high kitsch, in which the most stupid things are changed into the extraordinary.” – Kill Switch

In my own opinion Skinny Puppy’s album Vivisect VI and the tour that went with it was the pinacle of their career. I saw that live show and have a jacked covered in fake blood to prove it. What you see above is a diagram CEvin Key posted on his Facebook page (link). It was used to set up their synths including Akai S900, Ensoniq ESQ-1, Emax, Moog, SPX90, Pro-1, Mirage and a Roland TR-808. What a nice find.

“This is the only Skinny Puppy album on which Dave Ogilvie (credited as “Rave”) is given songwriting credit and listed as an official member of the band. This was also the only album (until 2004’s The Greater Wrong of the Right) to feature a photo of the band.” – Wikipedia

“Hon Hai Precision Industry Co., Ltd. (trading as Foxconn) is a multinational electronics manufacturing company headquartered in Tucheng, New Taipei, Taiwan. It is the world’s largest maker of electronic components and the largest exporter in Greater China.” – Wikipedia

A few days ago Jack Tramiel past away. For most people it’s the his product the Commodore 64 that has them teary eyed in rememberance. For me however it is the Atari ST. When it came out the 520ST not only competed with the Mac it bested it on many fronts and it cost much less. I remember the first time seeing the Atari monochrome screen. People rave about the clearness of the new iPad 3’s screen and like today’s raves for the iPad that Atari screen was something to behold. It was so sharp and clear for the time. In addition the ST had something no other main computer system had: MIDI ports. I used DR T.’s KCS (Keyboard Controlled Sequencer) and later Cubase on a 1040ST. By the way theses were also in my own opinion beautifuly designed machines. Just look at that image above. Like my Apple products today I really loved that machine. It tempted me to create. I did also own an Amiga and loved it as well.

“In 1953, while working as a taxi driver, Tramiel bought a shop in the Bronx to repair office machinery, securing a $25,000 loan for the business from a U.S. Army entitlement. He named it Commodore Portable Typewriter.” – Wikipedia